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Wednesday, 28 December 2016

I’m sure it’s not just me that’s noticed there’s been a bonkers amount of high quality shows around recently! Since we now seem to be in a world where original programming via services like Netflix regularly kicks the movie industry’s arse, I’ve decided to do this new instalment of mini-reviews exclusively on new TV shows I’ve watched in the last 3 to 4 months. Still, it’s not all glowing...

Minor spoilers ahoy!

Westworld: Season 1
Let’s get all the gushing out of the way first. As TV shows continue to get more ambitious I do wonder if we're reaching a critical point where scripts start falling apart and actors give way to special effects. But as much as that often happens in movie blockbusters these days, it hasn’t happened to Westworld - a show that looks more expensive and polished than just about anything else this year (on the small or big screens), and yet has a rollickingly clever story and brilliant turns from extremely likeable actors (major props to Anthony Hopkins and Thandie Newton). I don’t want to talk too much about the show for fear of spoiling things - I will say that it pulls off multiple, satisfying, layered twists that reward audiences without alienating them, and production values that are simply off the charts. There’s a worry that its reliance on major revelations won’t keep working in future seasons, but I feel like the writers are smarter than me, so I’ll shut up now. Go watch it.

The Walking Dead Season 7A

While anticipation going into this new season was strong, I feel like the show ended up delivering one of its weakest runs of episodes ever, and I know I’m not alone feeling this way. So what went wrong? Well, for starters there's the overly repetitive presence of Negan... An uneven tone, caused perhaps by a misplaced adherence to the source material... Segregation of the core cast (I count five separate communities now, often with just one getting the focus of an entire episode) and an overall depressing, cyclical feel to the story. We know Rick will fight back eventually - we’ve seen it happen time and time again with each new threat he’s faced. Here’s hoping for a faster, more surprising, more action packed second half next year.

PS: Steven Ogg is awesome by the way. More of him please.

Ash vs Evil Dead: Season 2

Sticking with shows tackling the undead for just a sec, I really want to shine a light on what has quietly become one of the most consistent shows around. Not consistently amazing, mind, but that’s not what Ash vs Evil Dead is trying to be. This show is silly, it’s not clever, and it’s not even that funny most of the time - it’s a real ‘turn your brain off, sit back, relax, and just go with it’ sort of show. That in itself puts it in a real sweet spot as far as I’m concerned. Despite a somewhat weak antagonist this season, the character of Ash is always reliably entertaining, the nods to the (superior) original movies are always welcome, and it does feature the absolute most vile, disgusting, twisted scene I’ve ever seen in a broadcast medium. You have been warned.

South Park: Season 20

Member when South Park did a different story every week? Oh yeah I member. For the uninitiated, South Park took a fairly unprecedented approach this season by telling a totally self-contained, singular story arc about internet trolls and the destructive power of nostalgia across 10 whole episodes. The feeling by the end is that it didn’t really work, and I think Matt and Trey are aware of this (as even the title of the final episode would suggest). South Park has always been built on a rolling weekly basis; it’s perhaps clear in hindsight that hashing out the ultimate goal of this season’s narrative wasn’t going to be easy - particularly when so much hinged on a US election that didn’t go the way anyone expected. Still, I can’t blame them for trying. And we did get the member berries, the funniest thing to come out of South Park since the aftermath of Randy Marsh’s groin irradiation.

Luke Cage: Season 1

I don’t have too much to say about Luke Cage. I didn’t love it. I didn’t hate it. For what it’s worth, it’s another Marvel TV series that shares many of the same strengths and weaknesses as those that came before it - strong atmosphere and characterisation, poor and repetitive pacing. The blaxploitation approach is certainly an interesting angle for a mainstream series like this, and one which perhaps I struggled to get to grips with at first. It’s all very low key and understated, except for when it remembers it's a superhero show and finds excuses for fight scenes. It all feels rather mundane for a man with indestructable skin. Nevertheless, the writers do their damndest to come up with mcguffins to try to create the illusion of threat. I wouldn’t go into this one looking for thrills, but maybe go in looking for feels. Not emotional feels, just feels. There’s a lot of smooth jazz, bro.

Black Mirror: Season 3

The jump onto the Netflix bandwagon seems to have done Black Mirror a world of good. It feels bigger than before, it’s literally twice as long as before (6 episodes instead of 3) and writer Charlie Brooker is still finding new ways to tell dystopic, believable stories about the future of a technological society - it’s becoming scarily close to the real deal now. Since the episodes are so different, here are some super mini reviews of each one:

1: Nosedive: Or as I like to call it, ‘Instagrapocalypse,’ a very polished and darkly funny metaphor for social networking as a status symbol.2: Playtest: As someone who recently wrote about VR, this was a fun one to watch. Takes things to quite an extreme. Coulda done without the cheeky BioShock line, Charlie.

3: Shut Up and Dance: Bloody hell. This one’s just brutal. ‘Nuff said.

4: San Junipero: The most optimistic and touching Black Mirror has ever been. Probably a lot of people’s favourite for that exact reason.

5: Men Against Fire: Bit of a weak link I think - I guessed the twist right away and it’s basically the same plot as Haze, which isn’t exactly a great reference point.

6: Hated in the Nation: It’s too long, and it’s got a concept that some people might find a bit too wacky, but it’s a meaty satire that certainly sticks in the mind. Ahem.

The Man in the High Castle: Season 2

You know, this show has a lot going for it. It has a compelling premise - an alternate history that actually feels fleshed out and believable. There’s political intrigue, complex and morally ambiguous characters, a bit of supernatural mystery… but I can’t kid myself that the execution is really that great. It’s just generally… dull? The pacing is almost uniformly awful, the disparate elements of the plot never quite gel and for every subplot and character motivation that clicks, there’s something happening elsewhere that has me rolling my eyes. It’s a shame as I think this show still has the potential to really come into its own - the last two episodes in particular definitely made me perk up. It’s just… lose the tedium, please.

The Grand Tour (Initial Impressions)

It feels like Clarkson has become a little bit too smug. I know this was always his shtick, but there has to be a limit somewhere, surely? Gone are the budget and PC-friendly constraints of the BBC, and in its place we’ve got a show with more forced and scripted comedy than ever before. If that’s your cup of tea then great, but to me it just feels a little bit hollow and stuck up itself. Give us more natural, unscripted banter. Failing that, at least give us something that feels like it could have actually happened. We all know the Top Gear antics were scripted, but it wasn’t on the level of… pretending to shoot terrorists and dying repeatedly in a parody of Edge of Tomorrow. I mean, what? Still, it’s better than the recent Top Gear turned out. I think that much goes without saying.

Friday, 2 December 2016

"Is VR gaming a mainstream concept now?" I asked myself, cringing as the sub-par candidates from the latest series of BBC's The Apprentice flailed around with their Vive headsets talking about imaginary space badgers. It certainly doesn’t seem very long ago that the words ‘virtual reality’ were either an overused sci-fi trope or a stock phrase used to refer to video games themselves, usually by the press in another mis-informed rant about violence in the media.

Above: What people used to mean by 'virtual reality'

But VR games certainly have made a splash this year, with the ‘big three’ headsets all launching with a plethora of developer support and prices so alarming it makes you wonder what all the fuss is about. It’s certainly something new to come out of the games industry for once. I’m generalising - there are plenty of new things coming out of the games industry all the time, but to the general public it’s all a bunch of pixels, buttons and nonsense. But with VR, we now have people literally strapping goggles onto their faces in order to play games. It’s not hard to imagine the curiosity around this ‘hip new thing.’ It’s quite clear Lord Sugar and the Apprentice producers are all into ‘hip new things’, even if they couldn’t give a toss about VR or video games in general.

Oh, I could certainly harp on about how misguided the entire episode of The Apprentice was - how games don’t get conceptualised, built and then demoed to industry professionals in a day (props to the devs for turning them around so quickly), how the player’s interactions should be the priority of VR development, not the look of the imaginary badger… Anyway, my point is - what was once a fleeting, ‘look what John Carmack’s got cooking up in his basement’ affair for the nichest of the niche tech enthusiasts, seems to have branched out into something the general public is very much aware of, much like the motion controller fad of a few years ago.

Except this time nobody can afford it.

I can’t give much of an informed opinion on VR because I haven’t bought any of this tech. A lot of people have, clearly, but as mainstream as the concept of VR may have become, it certainly hasn’t been adopted by the mainstream. Part of this may well be due to the lack of truly essential software - we all know that software sells hardware. Part of this may also just be down to an overall level of skepticism on the gamer’s side. ‘Why do I need this?’ they’ll ask. ‘It’s early tech, I’ll wait for them to iron out the kinks.’ Or perhaps more damningly, ‘I don’t want to play games with half a hockey mask strapped to my head.’ And fair enough. VR is a fundamentally different way of playing games and it’s never going to appeal to everyone. And it’s expensive. Did I mention that it’s expensive? We’re living in turbulent times. Who is really going to want to spend the best part of a grand on first generation peripheral hardware, with wires trailing all over the place? Seriously, it's gotten so ludicrous people are trying to find ways to tie the cables to the ceiling.

If you’re curious about what VR has to offer I still think the best option is to seek out a demo unit somewhere and try it for yourself. I’ve been lucky enough to try out all of the big three (HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, PlayStation VR - I’m discounting the cheaper mobile offerings) at events over the last few months and these are my impressions after just a few minutes* of gameplay:

*(i.e. don’t trust anything I’m about to write)

HTC Vive:Price before Brexit: £689
Price after Brexit: £759 (Ouch!)
By definition, absolutely the most impressive VR experience around. It is room-scale after all, which means a fair amount of standing, ducking and dodging. I was actually most impressed by the motion controllers, which are extremely precise and do create an almost perfect illusion that you are holding real objects. The funny thing I observed is that because the controllers are so light, I felt like the guns and weapons I’d pick up were cheap Fisher-Price toys, not real killing machines. I do wonder if that’s going to require a real suspension of disbelief in some games, as you impale evil warlords with a spear that your brain thinks is made of foam.

I played two games - a robot shooter called Space Pirate Trainer and a zombie shooter that could have been any of the thousands of zombie games on Steam. These were simple wave based survival experiences with limited depth. I appreciated how fresh it felt playing in such a different way - and particularly liked mechanics like the shield in Space Pirate Trainer which you can actually hide behind then lean out to shoot.

Oculus Rift:
Price: £549
In terms of visual fidelity and sense of space, I’d say this is almost on par with the considerably more expensive Vive. I was disappointed in the headset itself though. Things weren’t off to a good start when I was told to take off my glasses and place them carefully inside the headset before putting it over my head. I didn’t have to do this with the other two. Then once I’d put the headset on, I was advised to spend a minute or two playing with straps (that I couldn’t even find) and get it all perfectly adjusted. Then after all that - I don’t know if this was my own incompetence or not - I could still see a gap at the bottom of the headset. All in all, pretty cumbersome. The game itself? Red Bull Air Race. And blimey. I’d read about reports of VR sickness before, but to experience it for the first time was… interesting. Yes, armed with just a regular Xbox pad I was doing all manner of loop the loops and flips and… yeah, it was kind of nausea inducing, and I dunno about you but I don’t play video games for induced nausea. Still - if you can handle it - and some people clearly can - I don’t doubt that it’s impressive fun.

PlayStation VR:
Price: £349
(plus £100 or so for camera / PS Move)
First impressions were that the resolution is pretty awful. To be fair, this is a problem on any VR set and it’s not that much more pronounced here. Actually, the reason why this was my first impression is because the actual act of putting on the headset and adjusting it is amazingly quick for PS VR. Both Vive and Rift take a large amount of faffing just to get the damn thing on, but PS VR fits amazingly well, even for glasses wearers like myself. Now, PS VR obviously works with the PS4 and most games play with just the standard DualShock 4. There are motion controls with the old PlayStation Move but apparently that’s a bit naff. I couldn’t tell you how well either of those work because my only demo was of ‘The Deep,’ an on-rails ride in the ocean you can’t even interact with. Still, I can’t praise enough how convenient and comfortable this headset is - it’s also by far the cheapest and most user friendly, so it’ll be my pick if I ever go impulse-buy crazy.

So, what are my takeways from all this VR dabbling? Well, most of all, I’m just really interested to see where VR goes from here. I love that it’s such a new, massively flawed thing that’s forcing developers to rethink how games should work. To me, that in itself is a good thing. Some may disagree, claiming that VR games are and will continue to be messy and mechanically basic. I like big, complex experiences as much as anyone, but I’m still enthusiastic about something genuinely new.

I tried to come up with a few VR game ideas myself:

Flip the zombie survival concept: Look I get the whole horror thing, but let’s flip it round so that you are the zombie. Why not? I’d love to flail around in first person with motion controlled limbs awkwardly grabbing survivors, leaning in for the bite. The more awkward it is the better (Note: could work just as well with any awkwardly moving monster creature - Godzilla?)

Hallway duelling in bullet-time: So Vive has you standing around and… not really walking anywhere, so why not have a pistol duelling game about outwitting your opponent with weird dodge moves. With really slow moving bullets. You know, Matrix style.

Grapple Man: Ok, so a lot of standing VR games resort to a teleport feature so that you can move around without your character having to walk and without your brain feeling too disconnected. So, instead of that, let’s design a character who can’t walk, but does have a great big grappling hook to pull things towards him - pieces of the environment, enemies… I love the idea of pulling someone in with one hand and thwacking him with a great big (Fisher Price) fist in the other.

Ant-Man the game: Well Batman got a game already, I was thinking about what other superheroes should follow suit and I settled on… Ant-Man? Really? Well think about it. The sense of scale going from regular to ant size. Thinking ‘gee whizz those are some nicely rendered floorboards.’ Riding ants during an on-rail shooter round someone’s garden. Who needs X-Wings? I’m not even kidding.

Trolley Simulator 2017: So it has been established that VR games with vehicles work pretty well thanks to the constant frame of reference - so... I’m bending the rules a tad but let’s go with trolleys. Imagine you’re pushing a trolley around, steering it around a shop, having to balance items in front of you. I just think it would be a lot of fun in VR. I promise this is unrelated to the game my friend’s working on.

There, you see Apprentice candidates, it isn’t so hard! Ok, ok, I’m joking. These clearly aren’t the best ideas ever. VR is a tricky thing to get right. It’s not easy for anyone.

To go back to my original point on VR games being a mainstream concept… The concept may well be mainstream, but that doesn’t mean the product is ready to be mainstream. I don’t know if VR will ever truly take off. It feels inherently restrictive, anti-social and cumbersome by its very nature. But put it this way, in 10 years from now, we’re going to look back at these feeble early attempts and laugh. Oh, those poor punters with their massive wallets, buying into unfinished tech. If only they knew what the gaming landscape would be like now. Read into that what you will...